Public urination complaints across New York City’s five boroughs have jumped nearly 50% since last year, according to NYPD data that’s drawing fresh calls from lawmakers to toughen penalties.

As of April 12, the city had logged 316 complaints of public urination, up from 214 during the same stretch in 2025. That’s a 47.7% increase in just over three months, and it’s rattling elected officials who say the current enforcement system isn’t working.

The spike lands alongside a counterintuitive trend. Public drinking complaints actually fell during the same window, dropping from 685 in 2026 to 570 this year, a decline of nearly 17%, according to the NYPD’s Quality-of-Life report. More bladders, fewer bottles.

City Council Member Joann Ariola doesn’t think the city’s current approach is cutting it. Ariola, who sits on the Council Health Committee, told amNewYork that a minor ticket won’t stop people from relieving themselves on sidewalks and in subway stations.

“The only way to bring this situation under control is to move public urination back to being a criminal offense rather than a civil infraction,” Ariola said. “These offenders are exposing themselves in public and creating health hazards, and they’re only getting a slap on the wrist ticket, if they get anything at all, if they get caught.”

Right now, police treat most public urination charges as non-criminal administrative code violations, resolved with a criminal court summons and typically a $50 fine, per the New York State Unified Court System. That fine hasn’t stopped the numbers from climbing.

Brooklyn Assembly Member Alec Brook-Krasny is pushing harder. He’s carrying a bill in the state legislature that would raise penalties to up to $500 for public urination or defecation in the city. Brook-Krasny’s proposal would make the financial sting considerably sharper. Whether the legislature moves on it this session is an open question.

Deterrence alone.

That’s what Ariola says the current system can’t provide.

The debate has roots going back more than a decade. In 2015, the NYPD issued over 150,000 criminal summonses for offenses that included public urination, littering, and unreasonable noise, and nearly 20,000 people that year received criminal summonses specifically for public urination. City Council members at the time argued those punishments didn’t fit the underlying offenses, and the city eventually moved to decriminalize them, shifting public urination into the administrative code and out of the criminal justice system.

Ariola wants that reversed.

The human cost of the status quo isn’t abstract. Urine accumulates in train hubs, under overpasses, in alleyways, and along building walls throughout the city. It creates odorous, unsanitary conditions that residents and transit riders deal with daily, and public health advocates have long flagged the issue as a quality-of-life problem that compounds in densely populated neighborhoods. As amNewYork’s coverage of the surge points out, some experts say the behavior can have detrimental effects for surrounding communities even when no criminal charge is filed.

How the NYPD is actually responding to the 2026 surge is harder to pin down. When reporters asked the department’s Deputy Commissioner of Public Information how many summonses police had issued for public urination so far this year, the response was direct: “data will be posted when it becomes available.” No timeline was given.

That data gap makes it difficult to measure whether enforcement has kept pace with the increase in complaints. A complaint logged with 311 or NYPD doesn’t automatically become a summons, and the ratio between those two figures would say a lot about how aggressively officers are writing tickets on the street.

There’s no single explanation for the uptick in complaints. The city’s shelter system, its transit network, and the pace at which public restrooms are maintained or made accessible all factor into where and why people relieve themselves outdoors. The New York City Department of Health tracks sanitary conditions across the boroughs, but the connection between publicly available restroom infrastructure and urination complaints hasn’t been formally quantified in the Quality-of-Life report data.

What the numbers do make clear is that complaints rose sharply from January through April 12, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle want the city to do something about it before the pattern runs deeper into the spring and summer months when outdoor activity peaks across all five boroughs.